"Maybe they were. Maybe they were,” Damien joked.

  Clara snickered. “How was it for you?”

  He shrugged. “I lost my sergeant trying to hold the evacuation perimeter against the final swarm," Damien shared, poking the fire with a stick. "He took a plasma grenade for a kid he didn't even know, just so the transport could lift off. I still see the flash if I think about it. The moment scarred my brain."

  "That defines the job we signed up for," Clara sighed, closing her eyes for a moment to fight the pain that pulsed in rhythm with her heartbeat. "We bleed so the suits can count their credits in safety and pretend the universe is a civilized place where heroes actually win."

  The fire crackled, a piece of wood snapping and sending sparks drifting toward the vent.

  "So, why are you still doing this, Clara?" Damien asked gently, watching her face. "You survived Antares. You could have taken a desk job, trained recruits, or just retired on a pension. Why risk your neck in the mud for shiny rocks?"

  Clara opened her eyes, and the firelight revealed a depth of determination that overrode the exhaustion. "It's not for the thrill, and it's certainly not for a yacht. My mother worked the helium extractors on the moons of Titan for forty years. Her lungs are shredded from the gas and the dust. She coughs up blood every morning, and the Coalition healthcare system just gives her painkillers and tells her to rest."

  She shifted, wincing as her armor scraped against the wall. "She needs a full lung replacement and a climate-controlled environment. I'm going to buy her a cloud-city condo on Venus where the air is scrubbed clean and smells like flowers. One more big haul, Damien. Just one more, and I can get her off that rock and let her breathe without pain for the first time in a long time."

  Damien nodded, understanding the motivation that burned hotter than the fire between them. "That's a good reason. Better than most. So… How’d your drop go wrong?"

  "We didn't get caught by the jungle; we got caught by greed and betrayal," Clara said, her eyes opening with a flash of cold anger that burned brighter than her pain. "We got hit by Void-Corp. Three of us dropped on a massive vein in the ridge, a deposit worth retiring for."

  She reached into her pouch and pulled out a heavy, canvas bag, tossing the object to Damien with a grimace of exertion. He caught the bag, opened the seal, and stared into the violet glow that spilled out and painted the walls in amethyst light. Inside sat three kilos of pure, high-grade Spark, glowing with an intensity that lit up the darkened bunker shadows like a captured star.

  "They waited until we harvested the deposit before they made their move," Clara continued, her voice devoid of emotion but heavy with the weight of loss. "Snipers. Ghost rounds that bypass kinetic shields. My team dropped before they even heard the shots fired. I managed to flank the shooters using my jump jets and a lot of anger. I killed most of them, but more showed up. The reinforcements actually ruined my extraction balloon, not the Void-Stalker. Hence why I was wandering the jungle in hopes of finding a ride out."

  "You took out a Void-Corp hit squad and a Stalker solo?" Damien asked, looking at her with newfound respect bordering on awe. "Remind me never to make you angry on a bad day, or any day for that matter."

  "You saved my life, Damien, so you get a pass on the violence," Clara said, gesturing to the bag of glowing wealth. "Take half. Consider the payment a consultation fee for the medical assistance and the rent for this lovely bunker."

  "I didn't do it for the money, I did it because we don't leave people behind," Damien said, though his hands didn't move away from the bag and the promise of freedom it held. “But I have bad news…”

  “You don’t have a balloon, I know. I know.” Her sad words seemed to still have hope. Damien also realized she likely gave him half the Spark to forgo any notion of killing her for all of it. “How’d ya lose yours?”

  “Ha, far less of an interesting story. Mechanical failure, simple as that.” He eyed the Spark. “I can’t take that.”

  "Don't be a saint, it doesn't suit the armor you're wearing or the company you keep," she scoffed, leaning her head back against the cold concrete. "Take the rocks. If not half, at least a quarter. If I die trying to extract, and you don't, at least one of us gets home with some good loot for once and then you can use it on whatever dream keeps you warm at night."

  Damien separated the stash, pouring a quarter of the glowing crystals into his own canisters with a steady hand that betrayed none of his internal excitement. The haul represented a fortune. This windfall would get him closer to the beach bar than he had ever been in his entire life.

  "Get some rest while I secure the perimeter," Damien told her, sealing his pack and adding more wood to the dying fire. "I'll take first watch and wake you if anything tries to eat us."

  The hours ticked by with agonizing slowness, the darkness outside the bunker shifting from absolute black to the gray of pre-dawn. Damien fought the urge to close his eyes when a rhythmic pounding echoed from the blast doors, startling him from his vigil.

  Thump. Thump-thump. Thump.

  The sound registered as a code. Parker’s code.

  Damien scrambled up the ramp, cycling the manual release on the heavy doors with a grunt of exertion that tested his own fatigued muscles. The metal groaned open, revealing Parker standing in the mist, looking fresh, reloaded, and loaded for bear with a massive extraction pack on his back.

  "You look like hell warmed over, boss," Parker grinned, stepping inside and handing Damien a fresh power cell. "I brought coffee, ammo, and a very expensive extraction balloon that Vinto insisted I buy."

  "You arrived earlier than expected," Damien said, taking the coffee and feeling the warmth seep into his gloves like life returning to a corpse. "I said morning, not before it."

  "I got bored waiting on the station," Parker shrugged, looking past Damien into the gloom of the tunnel with curiosity. "And Vinto threatened to sing the song of his people until I launched, which is a terrifying prospect. Who’s the friend?"

  Parker nodded toward Clara, who had limped up the ramp behind Damien, supporting herself on the wall with gritty determination.

  "This is Clara, a Lightning Raider who had a very bad night," Damien explained. "Void-Corp ambushed her team. She’s the last one standing, but she made them pay for it in blood."

  Parker looked at her ruined armor, then at the single heavy-lift balloon strapped to his back, calculating the physics. "I… didn’t plan for this. I can take her. But the balloon is rated for two heavy loads, not three.” He whispered, “If I take her up, you stay down here." Damien had hoped for a balloon of his own, but for whatever reason, Parker was only able to secure the heavy-lift balloon for his own suit. It would have been fine, if not for Clara.

  "I figured that would be the math," Damien said, looking at the sky where the first hints of purple bled into the black of the retreating night. "Take her. Get her to the medics before she bleeds out internally. I'll hunker down for another cycle and catch the next ride out. At least this spot is somewhat defensible."

  "This’ll refill your water and nutrient paste supplies," Parker said, handing over a resupply pack that felt heavy with promise. He messed with Damien’s bag. "And I’m taking the liberty of grabbing your loot so you can travel light. No sense in you carrying dead weight if you have to run for it."

  "Smart thinking," Damien nodded, accepting the pack and feeling the lighter load on his shoulders. "We need to make a pit stop before you launch. The Obsidian-Behemoth carcass lies about a click east. We can harvest the plating before you go. It's worth some credits to the armor smiths."

  “Sounds like a plan. I want to try to get back during the day if I can,” Parker said, eyeing the rising sun in the distance. “They already let me drop once at night, but they didn’t like it since it’s technically against the rules.”

  “Drop to the west, then glide… you did that, didn’t you,” Damien said, figuring his friend thought like him.

  Parker cracked a huge smile. “Exactly. Now, let’s do this.”

  They supported Clara between them, moving quickly through the morning mist to the clearing where Damien had killed the tank-beast. The scavengers had picked the bones clean of meat, but the heavy black chitin plates remained untouched, gleaming in the pale light like obsidian. They spent twenty minutes laser-cutting the most valuable sections, strapping the armor plates to Parker’s harness until he looked like a pack mule.

  "Alright, that loads us to max capacity," Parker grunted under the weight of the woman and the armor plates. "Any more weight and we’ll be digging a hole instead of flying."

  They found a break in the canopy that likely had been used before by another team. Parker strapped Clara to his chest, checking her vitals one last time to ensure she wouldn't die on the ascent from the G-forces.

  "Next time, you’re taking the tourist," Parker joked, though his eyes remained serious behind the visor. "Stay safe, Damien. I'll be back as soon as I drop her off and get authorization for a return drop."

  "Just make sure she pays her tab at the bar," Damien smiled, slapping the release mechanism on the pack.

  The balloon inflated with a hiss, shooting Parker and Clara into the sky like a reverse meteor leaving the atmosphere. Damien watched them go, a small orange sphere vanishing into the clouds, taking his friend and his ticket home with it.

  He stood alone again in the jungle, the silence pressing in around him like a physical weight.

  The silence of the morning should have felt peaceful, but the atmosphere hung heavy with threat, thick enough to choke on. The birds refused to sing. The insects ceased their buzzing.

  The jungle held its collective breath in anticipation of violence.

  A roar shattered the quiet, originating from close range and deafening in intensity. The sound didn't belong to the Behemoth. The cry didn't belong to a Stalker.

  The roar belonged to the Void-Mauler.

  Damien spun around, raising his rifle with adrenaline flooding his system like ice water. The massive bear exploded from the treeline two hundred meters away, its fur singed and patchy from the fire, one eye a milky white ruin of scar tissue. But the other eye burned with a hate that transcended instinct and spoke of a personal vendetta.

  The beast had tracked him through the night, ignoring the pain, driven by pure malice. The monster had waited for the moment he was alone.

  "You have got to be kidding me," Damien cursed, realizing he stood in the open with no backup and no heavy weapons capable of stopping a Titan-class charge.

  The beast charged, the ground shaking with its approach like an earthquake, trees snapping like twigs in its path.

  Damien didn't fight this time; he knew when the odds were fatal.

  He turned and fled like the devil himself wanted to claim his soul.

  He sprinted toward the dense treeline to the west, away from the bunker, away from the extraction point, and away from any hope of immediate rescue. He engaged his jump jets, boosting over roots and rocks, pushing his suit to the red line as the servos whined in protest.

  The roar chased him through the trees, getting closer with every desperate step, the hot breath of the monster feeling like a furnace on his neck. He ran deeper into the unknown, further from Parker’s return vector, plunging into the heart of the Western Sector where the maps were blank and the monsters were nameless.

  "Parker, if you can hear me," Damien panted into the comms, though he knew the signal blocked by the dense ironwood trees likely wouldn't reach the upper atmosphere. "Don't come back to the clearing. The bear is back and it's pissed. I'm going deep."

  He vaulted a fallen log and kept running, the breath tearing at his lungs like broken glass, wondering how long a man could outrun a nightmare before he had to turn and face the teeth that waited in the dark.

  Chapter 15

  The Ghost of Atlantis

  The chase through the dense undergrowth devolved into a desperate, terrifying gamble.

  He knew damn well that the Void-Mauler was designed by evolution to run down anything that dared to flee it.

  Damien repeatedly engaged his jump jets in short, frantic bursts, vaulting over tangled root systems that sought to snare his ankles, the roar of the Void-Mauler echoing behind him like a physical blow to the spine.

  The monster crashed through the ironwood trees with the subtlety of a landslide, snapping trunks as thick as a man's waist and turning the vegetation into shrapnel that rained down on Damien’s armored shoulders. He didn't look back; the tremor of the earth beneath his boots told him everything he needed to know about the closing distance.

  "You stubborn, overgrown rug, give up already!" Damien shouted into the comms, though he knew Parker was long gone and the beast couldn't understand his insults.

  He banked hard to the left, aiming for a rocky outcropping that might offer a momentary reprieve or a bottleneck to slow the Titan down.

  As he cleared the ridge, the ground beneath him disappeared, giving way to a sheer drop that his sensors hadn't mapped in the chaos of the retreat.

  Damien fell, his stomach lurching into his throat as gravity claimed him with a vengeance. He flailed for a grip, his fingers scraping uselessly against wet moss and crumbling stone, before he slammed into the side of a steep, angled tunnel hidden beneath the foliage.

  The impact jarred his teeth, but his momentum carried him downward, sliding uncontrollably into the dark throat of the earth.

  He skidded for what felt like an eternity, the ceramic plating of his suit screeching against the rock, sparks flying in a dazzling shower that illuminated the tunnel walls. The slide was steep, angled at a perilous forty-five degrees, turning him into a human sled rocketing toward the unknown.

  He dug his heels in, the servos in his legs whining as they fought to arrest his descent, slowing him from a terminal velocity crash to a controlled, bruising slide.

  Above him, the circle of light that marked the surface entrance darkened abruptly.

  The Void-Mauler had arrived, covering the opening.

  The beast smashed its massive, armored face into the opening, roaring in frustration as its shoulders caught on the narrow rock walls. Dirt and stones rained down on Damien, bouncing off his helmet as the monster tried to dig its way down, its claws gouging deep furrows in the stone.

  "Too fat to fit, you ugly bastard," Damien wheezed, coming to a halt at the bottom of the slide and scrambling away from the falling debris pile.

  The tunnel didn't end in a natural cavern or a burrower’s nest as he had expected. The floor beneath his boots changed from rough, natural stone to something smooth, metallic, and undeniably artificial.

  Damien activated his suit lights, the beams cutting through the dust to reveal a corridor that stretched into the darkness, lined with panels of a dull, gray alloy that absorbed the light rather than reflecting it.

  "This isn't Iron-Clad construction," Damien whispered, running a gloved hand along the seamless wall. "The geometry is too clean, the alloy too advanced for a prefab base."

  The walls curved organically, lacking the harsh industrial angles typical of human or Saurian architecture. It felt like walking down the throat of a machine that had been grown rather than built. He crept down the corridor, his footsteps echoing with a hollow, metallic ring that sounded like a bell tolling in a crypt. The air here was stale, recycled millions of times over, smelling of ancient dust that had settled over centuries.

  As he moved, a prickling sensation crawled up the back of his neck, the distinct, primal feeling of being watched. Damien spun around, his rifle raised, scanning the shadows behind him with thermal and night vision.

  Nothing. Just the empty corridor and the settling dust.

  "Get a grip, Damien," he muttered to himself, lowering the weapon but keeping the safety off. "You're spooked. It's just the acoustics."

  At the end of the hall, a heavy, circular hatch blocked his path, its locking mechanism devoid of any recognizable interface or keypad. It was a smooth iris of metal, seamless and imposing.

  "Let's see if you handle plasma better than the bear," Damien muttered, unholstering his heavy cutting torch.

  He ignited the blade, the blue flame hissing as he drove it into the seam of the door. The metal resisted, glowing a stubborn cherry red, but it eventually yielded to the persistent heat. Molten slag dripped onto the floor as Damien carved a man-sized hole through the barrier, kicking the cooling metal inward with a heavy boot.

  He stepped through the breach and froze, his breath catching in his throat.

  He wasn't in a bunker. He was standing on the bridge of a starship that had likely been buried for a very, very long time.

  The space was vast, dominated by a panoramic viewport that was currently pressed against tons of subterranean rock, the pressure stress lines visible in the reinforced glass. Consoles lined the walls, their surfaces dark and dormant, covered in a layer of dust thick enough to write a novel in. In the center sat a command chair, empty and waiting for a captain who would never return.

  "Computer, scan for power signatures," Damien ordered, but his suit returned only a flatline of static.

  He moved deeper into the ship, navigating corridors that twisted with organic fluidity. He found a medical bay, the walls lined with surgical beds that floated on failed magnetic fields. On one bed lay a skeleton, the bones distinctly human, yet slightly larger, more robust. The medical tools scattered on the floor were made of a crystalline substance that chimed when he nudged them with his boot.

  "Human," Damien noted, examining the skull. "But the cranial capacity is larger. Engineered? Or evolved?"

  Further down the hall, he breached a heavy door labeled with symbols that resembled flowing water. Inside, the air was thick and humid and he realized it was a hydroponics bay. The plants had long since died and petrified, leaving behind a forest of stone-like vines and desiccated leaves. Yet, in the center, a single, pulsating bulb of bioluminescent flora clung to life, feeding off a leaking nutrient pipe.